Only What I Like!

What Netanyahu also knows is that President Obama seems to have blind spot when it comes to the growing anti-Semitism that resembles what existed in the 1930s in Europe

Netanyahu and Jewish Survival

In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, representing 1.7% of the total European population which, in turn, was about 60% of the Jewish world population, estimated to have been 15.2 million.

By 1945, in the wake of the Holocaust, two out of every three Jews would be dead.

By 2012 the global Jewish population by had reached 13.75 million. That is less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported that 43% of the world’s Jewish community lives in Israel. Sharing Israel as their home were 1,636,600 Arabs and a diverse population of Christians and non-Jews, numbering around 318,000.

If the Iranians make good on their threat to “wipe Israel off the map”, presumably with nuclear weapons they would acquire by stealth and deception, the Jewish world population would be cut nearly in half.

All of this will be on Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind when, as the Prime Minister of Israel, he addresses a joint meeting of Congress. It will be his third such speech. On July 10, 1996, he said the world must act to prevent Iran’s nuclearization, since “the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.”

In 2011 he returned, saying “When I stood here, I spoke of the consequences of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Now time is running out. The hinge of history may soon turn, for the greatest danger of all could soon be upon us, a militant Islamic regime armed with nuclear weapons.”

So now it is 2015 and the only thing Netanyahu knows for sure is that the Iranians remain intent on being able to produce their own nuclear weapons.

The March 2nd edition of The Times of Israel reported that Yukiya Amano, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said “Iran has yet to provide explanations that enable the agency to clarify two outstanding practical measures”, a diplomatic way of referring to “alleged explosive tests and other issues related to research that may also be useful for military uses of atomic energy.” This is the same problem that the U.N. agency has with North Korea.

Netanyahu was worried about Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 1996, in 2011, and now in 2015; more than enough time for Iran to have made considerable progress toward their goal. At the heart of this third address to Congress is the survival of nearly half of all the Jews in the world because they live in Israel.

It’s no secret there is no love-loss between Bibi Netanyahu and Barack Obama, but this third effort to urge Congress to go on record supporting the survival of Israel is necessary because, for the first time since 1948, there is some cause to wonder whether a war-weary U.S. would come to Israel’s defense.

Obama has said in no uncertain terms that he wants to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, the world has learned that the gap between what he says and what he does is often wide or non-existent. It must be said, however, that past Presidents have decried North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, but that has not translated into any direct action because China entered the Korean conflict in the 1950s to defend it and no one wants a repeat of that.

Netanyahu does not speak for “all Jews.” He speaks for Israel and other than national survival the political divisions there are even more diverse than our own. The fact that he is running for reelection there is not a factor for his speech to Congress—timing is.

One suspects that the best intelligence both Israel and the U.S. have been able to secure suggests that, this time, Iran is very close to its goal of being able to produce its own nuclear weapons despite the sanctions that have been imposed.

Netanyahu is understandably concerned about the negotiations that Obama has relentlessly pursued with Iran, the result of which has alienated not only Israel, but Saudi Arabia and all of the Gulf nations. The P5+1 parties to the negotiations include Russia, China, France, United Kingdom and Germany. The negotiations have deadlocked in the past and may do so again despite the fact that both Russia and China have close ties to Iran.

Even if Iran agrees to terms that would supposedly slow or stop its nuclear weapons program, there is not a scintilla of evidence that they would fulfill their promises. Iran, after all, is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism worldwide.

The odds are that Netanyahu knows that Iran, this time, is very close to becoming militarily nuclear. Addressing Congress calls attention to the danger, not only domestically, but worldwide.

What Netanyahu also knows is that President Obama seems to have blind spot when it comes to the growing anti-Semitism that resembles what existed in the 1930s in Europe. When Jews in a French kosher supermarket were murdered, Obama referred to it as an act of “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

Whoa! It wasn’t “a bunch of folks.” They were Jews buying food for the Sabbath meal. And those “violent, vicious zealots” were Muslims, just like the ISIS Muslims beheading, crucifying, burning, kidnapping, and enslaving those they don’t kill for being Christian, Jewish, Yazidis, or just not Muslim enough!

Netanyahu’s speech will, indeed, be historic. It may not be his last visit to the chambers of Congress.

THE dawn of the planet of the smartphones came in January 2007, when Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in front of a rapt audience of Apple acolytes, brandished a slab of plastic, metal and silicon not much bigger than a Kit Kat. “This will change everything,” he promised. For once there was no hyperbole. Just eight years later Apple’s iPhone exemplifies the early 21st century’s defining technology.

Smartphones matter partly because of their ubiquity. They have become the fastest-selling gadgets in history, outstripping the growth of the simple mobile phones that preceded them. They outsell personal computers four to one. Today about half the adult population owns a smartphone; by 2020, 80% will. Smartphones have also penetrated every aspect of daily life. The average American is buried in one for over two hours every day. Asked which media they would miss most, British teenagers pick mobile devices over TV sets, PCs and games consoles. Nearly 80% of smartphone-owners check messages, news or other services within 15 minutes of getting up. About 10% admit to having used the gadget during sex.

The bedroom is just the beginning. Smartphones are more than a convenient route online, rather as cars are more than engines on wheels and clocks are not merely a means to count the hours. Much as the car and the clock did in their time, so today the smartphone is poised to enrich lives, reshape entire industries and transform societies—and in ways that Snapchatting teenagers cannot begin to imagine.

Phono sapiens

The transformative power of smartphones comes from their size and connectivity. Size makes them the first truly personal computers. The phone takes the processing power of yesterday’s supercomputers—even the most basic model has access to more number-crunching capacity than NASA had when it put men on the Moon in 1969—and applies it to ordinary human interactions (see article). Because transmitting data is cheap this power is available on the move. Since 2005 the cost of delivering one megabyte wirelessly has dropped from $8 to a few cents. It is still falling. The boring old PC sitting on your desk does not know much about you. But phones travel around with you—they know where you are, what websites you visit, whom you talk to, even how healthy you are.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department.” –Michael S. Schmidt

According to my man in State, the arms deal with Iran is going swimmingly. Here is some of the diplomatic give and take Obama will be making to sweeten the deal:

A new PBS kids show: Mr. Ahmedinejad’s neighborhood

Iran will officially blame Bush for their nuclear program

Out of the radioactive ashes, Barack will be given Obamastan

The Ayatollah gets to keep Kerry as his personal eunuch

Free birth certificates and social security numbers for any Iranian who can get across the border

Obama gets to declare the Middle East a nuclear weapon free zone, so Israel must give up their weapons

The only droning allowed by Americans will be Barack’s speeches

Iran will allow US sponsored Job Fairs into Tehran

Obama has agreed to return America to its pre-1492 borders

Hillary will be confined to a burka now and forevermore

Because hey, my 10 Rules of This Blog says I can give you boobs if I want….

Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Nears Fiscal Free Fall

Cities: The problem with socialism, Margaret Thatcher once noted, is you eventually run out of other people’s money. In progressive Chicago, that’s hit home as Moody’s has cut its credit rating to two grades above “junk.”

Chicago’s finances are staggering under the weight of an unfunded pension liability that Moody’s Investors Service has estimated at $32 billion, eight times the city’s operating revenue.

Chicago has a $300 million structural deficit. And Illinois law requires the city to up its 2016 contributions to its police and fire pension funds by $550 million.

“This is an unfortunate wake-up call for anyone still asleep over the fiscal cliff facing the city of Chicago,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Chicago-based government finance watchdog, the Civic Federation.

The steady financial decline of the nation’s third-largest city prompted us recently to say that Chicago was well on its way to becoming the next Detroit.

In other words, it’s another bankrupt monument to the perils of Democratic governance: a one-party town in one of the bluest states, whose mayor, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, learned financial discipline at the feet of President Barack Obama.

A large part of Chicago’s problem is that the game of maintaining campaign armies by overpromising and underfunding pensions is over. Emanuel can expect little help from Illinois’ new Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, who is trying to fix similar problems at the state level.

Chicago’s pension funds are only 40% funded, and prospects aren’t good, as people — particularly high-income individuals and businesses — flee the city’s high taxes and stiff regulations.

Emanuel recently emerged from the Windy City’s mayoral primary with just 45% of the vote against four opponents, forcing Chicago’s first-ever mayoral runoff. A poll taken by local polling firm Ogden & Fry on Feb. 28 showed Emanuel leading second-place primary finisher Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who serves on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, by a slim 42.9% to 38.5% margin. Chicago natives are clearly restless.

As Aaron Renn has noted in City Journal, Chicago lost 7.1% of its jobs in the first decade of this century. Its famous Loop, the second-largest business district in the nation, lost 18.6% of its private-sector positions.

Raising the city’s minimum wage will not reverse that trend. People are leaving in droves, voting the only way they can in a one-party town — with their feet.

From 2000 to 2009, Chicago’s population shrank by 200,000 — the only one of the nation’s 15 largest cities to lose people. The city now has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had more than a decade ago, according to district data, forcing the closure of about 100 schools since 2001.

Chicago may soon be forced to go to Washington for a bailout similar to New York City’s 1975 rescue. The prospect of Emanuel begging his former boss, President Obama, for financial help would be ironic indeed.

The man who once said that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste now finds his city and President Obama’s home town in fiscal crisis and his own political future teetering on the brink.